Charter for Working Group

Providing QoS enabled services across a diffserv enabled network is often closely linked with the negotiation of a Service Level Specification (as defined in draft-ietf-diffserv-new-terms-03.txt) over the administrative boundary where the service is provided.

The SLS BOF will examine whether a Working Group should be chartered to design a formal extensible model for Service Level Specifications and requirements for the negotiation of Service Levels across (administrative) boundaries. Based on input from the BOF a sharply focused proposal with milestones will be submitted, if need be.

The need to have an agreed set of Service Level Specification parameters and semantics is twofold.

A formal, extensible specification would enable automation of the service negotiation process. Providers and customers would benefit from the faster turnaround of service fulfillment. Providers would continue to enjoy flexibility in designing their service offerings, and customers would enjoy independence from their point of attachment.

Second, the design and the deployment of services across a multi-vendor and multi-provider environment requires a standardized set of semantics for Service Level Specifications being negotiated at different locations: (a) between the customer and the service provider (b) within an administrative domain (for intra-domain SLS negotiation purposes) and (c) between administrative domains (for inter-domain negotiation purposes).

While the semantics of the Service Level Specification need to be defined in a vendor-independent, interoperable and scalable manner, the syntax of the specification may be represented in different specification languages, eg., CIM, LDAP schemata, XML DITs, etc. Similarly, while the semantics of message exchanges during service negotiation need to be specified, the actual packet formats may depend on the protocol chosen for such a negotiation.

The notion of customer and provider as used within this description refer to a service requesting and a service offering entity respectively, and does not imply the specification of any particular business model.

The BOF will be used to gain input on the scope of the proposed working group, such that the goal of semantic specification is fulfilled, together with a narrow but representative syntactic set.